Such exposure is the service Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan performed Aug. 13 by discussing the role played by U.S. and global elites.

Under the jarring headline, “How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen,” Noonan wrote that when German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered to accept nearly a million Mideast refugees this year, she “put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her, but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections.”

But Merkel and her top supporters are insulated by money and position from those effects. As Noonan wrote, “Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street – that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected.”

Even worse, “The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them ‘xenophobic,’ ‘narrow-minded,’ ‘racist.’ The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called ‘humanist,’ ‘compassionate,’ and ‘hero(es) of human rights.’ ”

Noonan ends with a telling American example, noting that State Department data show that almost all of the refugees settled in Virginia since October “have been placed in towns with lower incomes and higher poverty rates, hours away from the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C.”

That means, “Of 121 refugees, 112 were placed in communities at least 100 miles from the nation’s capital. The suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington – among the wealthiest in the nation, and home to high concentrations of those who create, and populate, government and the media – have received only nine refugees.”

That’s just one example, she concluded, of the elites’ “sheer and clever self-protection.”

Her comments were widely noted, with some recalling President Obama’s 2008 campaign-related statement that “it’s not surprising” that average people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Others said the trend was reminiscent of the dystopian society of “The Hunger Games,” where residents of Capitol City live in luxury while everyone else labors to support them.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson said in a National Review Online column Monday that ordinary people are not angry at all the wealthy, “but at the well-connected elites whose lives are graced with cultural and social privileges, characterized by insider influence and generationally embedded connections” that blind them to “the direct results of their own ideological agendas.”

And R.R. Reno, editor of the prestigious religious journal First Things, that same day described one potential cause, an “elephant chart” so named because, in tracking global income growth from 1988 to 2008, the curve resembles the outline of an elephant.

From the poorest of the poor, it quickly rises to a big hump for non-Western nations’ middle classes, dips like the bend in a pachyderm’s trunk for middle classes in the West, and rises again to a peak for global elites at the highest income levels.

“The global system,” he wrote, “is committed to the free flow of labor, goods, and capital (and) works well for the leadership class in Europe and North America, as it does for striving workers in China, India, and elsewhere. It doesn’t work so well for the middle class in the West. Thus, in the West, the led no longer share the economic interests of their leaders.”

So, “Ordinary people feel abandoned and frustration builds, driving today’s populism.” which is strengthened, not eliminated, when their concerns over open borders and minimal growth are discounted and their motives are demonized.

If this is correct, and global in scope, then the outcome of a single U.S. election will not resolve it.

What’s Reno’s vision of the ultimate result? “The decoupling of the leaders and the led is ‘something big.’ The economic forces driving this decoupling are powerful. The ideological supports – a morally superior cosmopolitanism, a flexible multiculturalism, and now dominant utilitarian thinking – are strong.”

Thus, the “odds are good that the democratic era will come to an end. The elephant chart suggests the future will be one of empire.”

His grim point is that “Capitol City” is what history shows you will get when resources are concentrated in the hands of deracinated, disconnected and disdainful elites.

M.D. Harmon, a retired journalist and military officer, is a freelance writer and speaker. He can be contacted at:

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gadfly371

Excellent piece, unless of course you’re one of te elites.

KennebunkportPatriot

MD: Bowdoin, military officer, journalist, print pontificater, and now priest.

He sounds pretty elitist to me.

gadfly371

No you’re stretching it.

KennebunkportPatriot

Just what is an ‘elite’, in the minds of tea/conservatives?

The last leader to single out a class of intellectuals for attack came to power in Berlin in 1933. Erdogan in Turkey has just clamped down on intelligentsia. Tell me, is that the goal of the ConTeaGOP? Cracking down on liberal thinking done by educated people? Fascism is never successful. It never was. In the end, those who attack the elite are put back in their place.

By all metrics of normal society, M D Harmon is an elite.

CMAA

An elite pontificator…..

CMAA

Rather it sounds like someone unsure of what they want to be upon growing up…….

Christopher White

Leave it to the predictable M.D. Harmon to pretend, as always, The Elite are well-educated LIBERALS of great wealth, insulated from the realities of life. Those bankers whose clever ‘investment instruments’ like synthetic CDOs ushered in the Great Recession, the CEOs of arms manufacturing corporations profiting from conflicts around the world, the IMF and all the rest? Naah, they aren’t the sort of ‘Elite’ Mr. Harmon has trouble with. All the GOP and self-styled conservatives in DC have nothing to do whatsoever with the refugees being resettled in poorer communities. The 0.1% aren’t the problem. No, just anyone who suggests refugees fleeing conflicts (caused, in large part, by the sort of military adventurism so beloved by Mr. Harmon) might deserve some compassion and relief.

Git along there, little proggie. The rest of the herd is headed off without you.

Joe O’Donnell

Remind me of when there was any real alignment between the political / business leaders and most of the rest of us — back when America was “great”??
Didn’t think so. This is just more Harmon regurge of right-wing scare-mongering.
Suppose if he ever had an original thought, that would be even worse…

gadfly371

He’s “spot on”, Joe.

justanotherfakename

“You will be judged by how you treat the least of those among you.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I grew up in a Christian family, and sorry M.D. but you don’t sound very Christian for a man who professes to be so. You want to hunker down and lock the gates, so don’t be surprised that Republicans base is shrinking.

morn’joe

Sounds like Victor Davis Harrison is slamming wealthy democrats as the blinding force to a political agenda; yet other wealthy peoples(republicans) have no political agenda. Hypocrisy.

RR Reno is stretching the elephant…….but would agree the new ideals are strong and in this is where America has its problem.But it is not just a Democratic agenda, they are in the drivers seat and have the wealth and influence behind them for this current election.The ‘other’ (non democrats) wealthy people you mention, are not in this position in this election. 4,8,12-16 years they will be back with another endearing agenda for their concerns issues and monies.

Most of us do what the upper echelon do -trickles down the social ladder…no different

What if the established give to those who they send away from themselves and give them the resources and let them define for themselves what to do and how to correct their own issue concerns and problems, instead of ‘us’ giving pieces of a pie setting them up for ultimate failure purposely? (which is how both parties run this country except for their own parties and the like thinking in their boxes).

Thistle

Just because we don’t hear much about limousines anymore does not mean that limousine liberals have gone away.

One of the hallmarks of liberalism is the utter hypocrisy of the “do as I say, not as I do” ethos.